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Abstract

A major issue so far for digital holography is the low spatial resolution generally achieved. The numerical aperture is limited by the area of currently available detectors, such as CCD sensors, which is significantly lower than that of a holographic plate. This is an even more severe constraint when IR sensors such as microbolometers are taken into account. In order to increase the numerical aperture of such systems, we developed an automatic technique which is capable of recording several holograms and of stitching them together, obtaining a digital hologram with a synthetic but larger numerical aperture. In this way we show that more detail can be resolved and a wider parallax angle can be achieved. The method is demonstrated for visible as well IR digital holography, recording and displaying large size objects.

(a) synthetic hologram obtained stitching together 3 × 7 single holograms and its numerical reconstructions at two different distances, 515 mm (b) and 505 mm (c). The increasing of the numerical aperture implies a decreasing of the depth of focus.

(a, Media 1) Frame of the movie showing the numerical reconstruction of the left and right part of the stitched hologram, (b, Media 2) frame of the movie displaying sequentially seven 1920 × 1080 holograms extracted from the stitched hologram.